6 Minute English - Disappearing words | Текст песни

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• Disappearing words

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Группа Learning English.

Kate: Hello, I'm Kate Colin and this is '6 Minute English' - and thanks to Jackie
Dalton for joining me today. Good Morrow Jackie!
Jackie: Eh…pardon?
Kate: Good Morrow! I beseech thee, whence comest thou?
Jackie: Ermm…
Kate: Don’t worry, I didn’t expect you to understand that, I’m speaking in ‘Old
English’. What I said was the equivalent of saying, ‘Good morning – where do
you come from?’, using words which were in use a few hundred years ago and
that we don’t use any longer.
Jackie: Hello Kate. Yes, English is a language which is evolving all the time. So this
means that there are new words continuously appearing and older words are
disappearing. I didn’t understand the ‘Old English’ you started the programme
with, because you were using words which we no longer use in everyday
speech.
Kate: Exactly. So, as you might have guessed, the topic we’ll be discussing is
language and how it evolves and develops.
So Jackie, as usual, I have a question for you…..
Some of the oldest English sounding words date back how many years?
a) 1000 years
b) 20,000 years
c) 500 years
Jackie: (answers)
Kate: OK, well we’ll check your answer at the end of the programme. But first,
we’re going to hear part of an interview with a scientist who has been using a
special computer to study our use of words and their evolution through time.
Can you tell us what ‘evolution’ means?
Jackie: Yes, ‘evolution’ – it’s similar to the word ‘evolving’, which I explained earlier.
‘Evolution’ is the gradual process of change and development over a long
period of time and in this context it refers to language and how it develops and
changes over the years.
Kate: OK – well let’s listen and see if you can hear which words he thinks are
some of the oldest in the English language…
Mark Pagal
‘Well we’ve be able to discover that the numbers two, three and five and the pronoun ‘I’
and ‘who’ – those are the oldest words in the English language’.
Kate: So Jackie, did you get that?
Jackie: Yes, he said that the oldest words were two, three and five and the pronoun ‘I’
and the word, ‘who’.
Kate: That’s correct. It’s hard to believe that some of the words we use everyday
are in fact, extremely old.
Back to our scientist, as well as thinking about words that have been in use
for many years, he also predicts which words may eventually become extinct.
Kate: Jackie, what does ‘predict’ mean?
Jackie: To ‘predict’ is to say what you think will happen in the future, especially as a
result of having prior knowledge or experience. For example, it’s cloudy
outside today, so I predict that it’s going to rain later.
Kate: and ‘extinct’ what does ‘extinct’ mean?
Jackie: ‘to become extinct’ means to be no longer in existence or you can use the
phrasal verb ‘to die out’. The word is often used when talking about a tribe of
people or a type of animal which has ‘died out’, for example the dinosaurs
have become extinct.
Kate: So our scientist predicts which words are likely to become extinct. He does
this by finding out how quickly different words evolve or develop and are
replaced by other words with the same meaning. Now, let’s listen to the
next extract. ….which words does he predict might become extinct?
Mark Pagal
‘We can make some guesses as to what words might next go extinct, so for example the
word ‘dirty’ seems to have the highest rate of change and so we might predict that
sometime in the next 750 years, that word will be lost’.
Jackie: He said the word ‘dirty’ may be lost or become extinct in the future. This is
because it’s being replaced quite quickly by other words that mean the same
thing.
...

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